Pages

Saturday, March 12, 2011

"What did you do during the holidays?"

"What did you do during the
holidays?" I have always been asked this question after holidays or longer
breaks from school, by almost everyone— teachers, relatives, classmates, etc.
To be honest, this is one of my most-feared questions in the world.

Every time someone asks me this question, I will
pause for a while and respond reluctantly with boring answers such as "I
read some books" or "I travelled to Ottawa." To me it
is always awkward to answer this question because I feel ashamed of the things
that I actually spend the most time on—playing computer games and video games.
It seems that people—especially adults—judge you by the kind of things you do
during non-school days, and by telling them about the unproductive activities that
you do, your status in their minds would drop. For example, what would you
think of a person who only "slept and ate" during the holidays?

Somehow my holidays always seem to be less meaningful than others', where they
do volunteer work and go to camps. I usually just stay at home and do what I
want (games+reading). Because of my lack of activities, once I had to awkwardly
say "I did... nothing..." when my dad's friend asked me this
question. That friend must have thought "what a boring teenager he
is!"

Perhaps this is a disincentive for us to do
unproductive things during holidays. Under the scrutiny of other people, one
must not waste their whole holiday doing nothing. Instead, one must do at least
one productive thing so that one can impress the others when being asked the
question "What did you do during the holidays?"

This time, I am hoping that I will be able to
say, confidently, that "I read five books and did 30 computer practice
problems during March Break."